The Flyfish Journal • The Flyfish Journal 13.4 • POSTCARDS FROM MARATHON

It’s good to have confidence in your guide when running flat out in pitch black to get to “the spot” by first light. In the Florida Keys, dawn patrol usually leads to happily rolling tarpon. Always a good call. Photo: Flip McCririck

Old soul, young body—beautiful curse. The squalor of migrating birds flying above migrating fish. I have stayed in the same place my whole life and not blinked, but now on this boat my face looks frozen to the passerby, like epiphany had struck me dead in the warm sunshine. But I am not frozen, I am not dead. I am more alive than I have ever been, floating in an unplanned direction in the face of a school of tarpon that are, quite simply, calculated to an exact breath. I am out of place, but beautifully so.

To tell you it all goes away when I tarpon fish would be a lie. It all shows up there, but it is in tarpon fishing where I am comfortable with the thoughts farmed from the depths of my brain. My head, the cavernous, empty place where decisions are made and people are forgotten. But not fish, not tarpon; it is where the smells, the sights, the tight line to the locked lips of a fish are born. I heard this doesn’t go away quickly, and it festers over time.

We are all voyeuristic, we are all looking for something to take our mind off the world. But are we looking for ourselves, or for the rest of the world? A mentor once told me the music in life is hidden between the pages of books, the seams of rivers and the current rips in the oceans. The friction, that’s where all the action happens. And what better place than between the lips of a tarpon, this beautiful minnow that captures me. I once met a man from Pennsylvania who told me there were two things in life that he would die for—tarpon and his daughter, in that order.

Hardly any of the furniture in my apartment is new. None of the appliances, artwork, the plates, the couch, the chairs and, most importantly, the white wooden desk where I sit to write, read and tie flies. It is my sanctuary of failed attempts, missed shots, and an altar of creative possibility. The desk is a roll top, which its first owner rarely rolled down, so it’s stuck in an upright position. There is one proud, rusty nail cocked at an angle to perfectly tie a Bimini Twist, and for each notch in the lip of the table, I can tell exactly where leader lengths become legal and illegal. Velcro straps, to let flies dry, line the balconies of the cubbies, where there are many miscellaneous pieces of equipment that long to be categorized correctly, but never will be. The permanence of a glue spill, a knocked-over coffee cup, an ink smudge and the subtle outline of a marabou plume in the top of the desk. As a Christmas tree has ornaments, my desk has marks of affection from the time spent working—my elbows on the desk, hunched over, counting thread wraps when I cannot sleep, like others count sheep jumping over a fence in a field somewhere far off. I am pacing the wraps between each breath, between periods of terror and mania. This is where things become. Joy Harjo begins her poem “Perhaps the World Ends Here” with the line, “The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.” My world begins with a bare hook and ends with a fish that jumps.

I sat on a barstool drawing tarpon flies in my notebook and a man came up to me and sat down, just to watch. I’m no good at drawing, and that was obvious. The lines of erosive sweat stains funneled from the brim of his visor, and in the light of the tiki bar, he got closer to me than I would have liked. Like his hat, his breath and teeth were stained from fishing stories he told guys like me at the bar after a few too many. He told me there was a day in May last year where he couldn’t stop taking waves over the bow, that he was the only one in the lineup that could get a fish to eat. I laughed when he told me the guides drove up to his boat to try and have a peek in his fly box. I didn’t buy any of it but acted like I did. His cigarette stalled in the tray where so many other cigarettes have, and we spent several hours trading tarpon stories. He insisted on buying me a beer, even though drinking isn’t my thing and never really has been. I let the longneck glass bottle sweat out amid the smoke and listened to the tarpon story he’d told twice already, this time with more pauses, more jolts when he hooked the fish, more screaming when the fish took off, more hair pulled out when it broke, more silence when it all went to shit. The crooked posture of the cigarette stumps leaned in the ashtray. He added another to the mix, pinching his fingers and twisting.

My drawings of the flies went unfinished and were far from perfect. The imagination goes off the rails when no one is watching, when no one is there to contest it. Like the man who caught more tarpon than he could count, no one was there to tell him it wasn’t true. Sometimes we must live in the worlds we create by ourselves because they are not nearly as magical to those who know they don’t exist. They will likely stay that way forever. I closed my notebook for the night. I thought about whether that man was real, or just a figment of my imagination. He slipped away to the pay phone to make a call to an ex-wife, and I made my way to the door.

An old lure with rusty trebles sits on his desk. At one point in time, we would have replaced it and kept it in rotation, but in its retirement, it sits on the desk like a jersey hung from the rafters. We are both looking for something, something unknown and undecidedly special. I can smell the breath of the marina through the closed window, and it tells me everything I need to know about the day ahead—it will be hot, we will see incredible fish and I will find sweat in places that I did not know I had sweat glands. The palms are skeletal against the morning tide, and what is now black will transition into vibrance with the help of the gleaming sun, untethered in its vicious glare. Tonight tells me that tomorrow will be even better, or so I think.

The lobster boats look clean. The old man without a finger is singing drunk karaoke in the shacks next to the boats. The tarpon are going ballistic, completely unbothered by his off-key singing, by the women next to him, who are on the clock and bored with what he brings to the evening. I know suffering exists, and I am familiar with the taste of a bad night, but tonight the slate is clean. The words I speak are few and their frequency is high with childish delight, watching the small version of the giants we saw this morning swim and glide through the dock lights. They are learning how to eat, and oftentimes they are not very good at doing so. I tie on a rusty fly so they don’t learn the hard way. It will take them several years before they start courting on the ocean side and, luckily for me, they can be my pets until then. They call this “beating the kids,” but I call it nurturing them. Teaching them not to be so gluttonous, so that when the seasonal guide from Montana who brings his clients to the Keys thinks he can waltz in and cut everyone off, karma will be in favor of the poon. Even the best fishermen need respect because at the end of the day, these fish, this world, this planet doesn’t owe you, me or anyone we know shit.

I climb the rocks and stash a minnow pattern in between the docks. I am in the middle of it, far, far away from anyone else. The mini tarpon fly through the air and break the silence of the current. The world could not be more beautiful on a night like this. A beaten-up fly box with retired rusty flies, a pair of pliers and a fly rod and reel that sound like they were made for each other. The pleasures of a late night with creatures that don’t know I exist.

I will rise in the morning ready to face the sun. We could sit and sip our cafecito slowly between the disposable mask tucked beneath the chin. We could call it apocalyptic, beautiful or both. Little that matters to humans matters in the world of a tarpon, and most people that fish for them understand this, but it doesn’t make sense to them, necessarily. The gravity of exactly what we are doing can never be felt because we are not living in their world. We will never live in their world and there is a lot to learn from that. Today we are tarpon fishing, so I wrote a list of beautiful things on a napkin and proceeded to throw it away. I did the exercise and called it Gratitude, but in retrospect, I should have called it Expectations.

Bullet points, a blueprint for something wild. A list, if you will, of palpable things that make me feel uncontrollably human. Frederick draws on a nonalcoholic Busch cardboard box with pencils, a sign that we are trying very hard to stay straight. We are drinking coffee like addicts because we are. A runny egg at Stout’s, and enough time zooming through Google Maps to draw our own, but we settle up and get ready to leave. There is a plan today to not have a plan. We are running in circles with our heads cut off.

There have been times in my life when I have tried coming up for air from the things that turn me astray, and there are times when I have resisted air as a self-deprecating exercise. We all know the feeling of abandonment, and as hard as we might try to never abandon what we love, or used to love, it will always happen. Things change.

Some people tell me they are coming up for air, but I think they are coming up to laugh. I think they are romantics themselves, hopelessly following their nose down south every year, knowing people like us will try their best to intercept them with a hook in the beak.

The clear blue soup crashes ashore, and we are doing the same thing people have done for years but feel as though we are doing it differently. How it changes your perspective to try something new to you. I tied the same fly every day for months and was confused when the tarpon I was looking for spat it out like a stubborn toddler in a high chair, refusing to let it go down easy. I have never been able to quantify the heartbeat, but when it is practically thumping on the floor, it is easy to do.

We ask questions not begging for answers, but to put words of hope into the air, to be part of it. Not for the sake of the words, but for the sake of curiosity, wondering why and how the world and its creatures do what they do. The mystery still amazes me.

There is proof of a God, and it is about as wide as a concrete pole, swimming away from me after an errant cast over the port side of its body. There are days when my brain convinces me that I am taking up space, that I am better off dead. On days like this, I’m sure glad I’m not. Today I am the king of myself, the king of the voices inside my head telling me a life worth living is impossible to find. I found it, looking inside the pupil of a tarpon.

The Flyfish Journal - The Flyfish Journal 13.4

POSTCARDS FROM MARATHON

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The Flyfish Journal 13.4